Category Archives: Media
After last night’s Have I Got News For You
I’ve updated the gender balance spreadsheet again. The figures now are: 23.26% of guests overall and 23.81% of guests this series are women. 22.78% of guest hosts overall and 2 out of 7 this season are women. Last night’s show was the second in a row to feature a female guest. Baroness Trumpington is the [...]
How to be a leading political commentator
Dan Hodges writes on the Telegraph website today: Ukip are not a political force, but a political curiosity. In years to come many a pub quiz trophy will be won by those who can correctly answer the question: “What was the name of the guy who ran the anti-EU party? Begins with an N.” In [...]
Have I Got News For You gender bias spreadsheet update
I’ve updated the spreadsheet after last night’s show, and it can be downloaded here. After a couple of weeks of all-male lineups, there was actually a female guest last night, so the figures are now that 23.23% of guests have been women, and 22.91% of guest hosts have been. UPDATE: Sorry, got the link wrong [...]
Gender bias on Have I Got News For You update
Last night was another show with all male guests, just the 108th time that’s happened since the last time all the guests were female. The averages change to 20% of female guests this series, while overall 23.2% of guests and 23.03% of hosts have been female. You can download the full spreadsheet here. Related PostsWorth [...]
More on gender bias and balance
A couple of follow-ups to my HIGNFY gender bias post on Saturday that I wanted to highlight. Jim Jepps has taken my data and put into a graph that shows the gap quite clearly, and the fact that – apart from the big dip in female guests in the mid-90s – there doesn’t seem to [...]
Is there gender bias on Have I Got News For You?
I noticed someone on Twitter last night point out that yet again, everyone appearing on Have I Got News For You was male. This piqued my interest, and I decided to take a look and see how HIGNFY had done over its existence in balancing representation of men and women. The answer appears to be [...]
James Delingpole sticking a fork into his face
Earlier today, someone linked to this amusing Storify collection of James Delingpole exhibiting his usual debating style of blocking and ignoring anyone who dares criticise him – especially when they commit the ultimate sin of using facts to challenge him. Normally, Delingpole’s someone I ignore – until the final revelation of his role as a [...]
Russell T Davies and faith
Writing and reading about Aliens vs Wizards on Thursday sparked up some old thoughts on Russell T Davies’ writing, and I wanted to set them down somewhere. As I’m trying to encourage myself to blog more again (as I have been doing for almost all of the ten years since I started) I thought this [...]
On being Newsjacked
As you’ll have noticed from my twitter feed yesterday, I managed to get a joke I’d written featured on BBC Radio 4 Extra’s Newsjack last night. If you want to hear it, then it’s available on iPlayer for another week, which you can listen to by clicking here. You should listen to the whole thing [...]
Wizards, Aliens and Doctor Who
If you haven’t heard, former Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies has got a new children’s show starting on the BBC soon – Wizards vs Aliens. The Guardian have seen the first episode at a press screening, and their review is very positive, and the sort of thing that makes me wish I was 10 [...]
by John Hodgman
by Drew Westen
by Ian Mortimer
by Jeff Greenfield
by Heather Peace
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